Real estate is a fast-moving industry. Properties go on and off the market, showings happen all over town, and deals are constantly evolving. Agent Inbox recognized the need for easy, seamless communication between agents, brokerages, and customers, and envisioned a modern messaging platform to facilitate it. Powered by Multiple Listing Service (MLS) data, the platform would help centralize each and every deal from start to finish.
After an initial year of internal development, Agent Inbox was frustrated and dissatisfied. They realized the platform needed to be rebuilt from scratch and knew it was time to seek help from an external team who could not only do the work, but could manage every aspect of the complicated project.
They hired us to build an efficient mobile and desktop messaging platform that we delivered on budget and on time. Within just one year of launch, Agent Inbox exceeded expectations with more than 100,000 users.
“I’ve been selling real estate for the past 25 years, and when people ask me what I’ve been most frustrated with in the process, it’s how we communicate. We’re texting, we’re emailing, we’re using WhatsApp, it’s all over the place. So we started Agent Inbox. We believe we’re leading the messaging revolution as it relates to our industry, and JetThoughts helped us build it.”
“As Agent Inbox grew, JetThoughts was able to scale up really quickly, has been super flexible with changing products, changing demands with us internally, and has been able to integrate very successfully with our engineering teams.”
The development process can be filled with uncertainty, especially when approached without necessary technical expertise. Our goal for this project was to reduce uncertainty by using proven technologies and stable coding practices, as well as focusing on clear communication and the implementation of an aggressive but realistic timeline for launch.
Following our plan, we delivered mobile versions for both the Apple App Store and Google Play, as well as a Desktop UI solution for brockerage/enterprise. Each contains features designed to provide control and peace of mind for everyone involved in the real estate transaction.
We wanted to get Agent Inbox something to showcase on the market – and fast. Within two months, we cleaned the MLS data, organized and optimized its integration for reduced cycle time, and were able to deliver the first MVP.
This gave the founders and sales team the ability to attract investors and customers, which in turn, helped scale up the development process. We were then ready to build and deliver both mobile and enterprise UI versions of the Agent Inbox platform.
While building the platform, we created a number of features that were beloved by users at launch (and beyond).
In addition to foundational messaging capabilities – including secure file and document sharing and a seamless way to keep track of detailed conversations – we built a mapping feature for agents to plan out their busy days to include traffic-inclusive travel time, meeting durations, lunch breaks, and more.
Being aware of how often plans can change throughout the day, especially in real estate, we also developed push notifications to alert them of any shifts in schedule.
In total, we worked with Agent Inbox over a 4-year period, and some of that time was dedicated to company growth.
We scaled the team from 1 to 6 developers within the first year and gained trust as a development provider. Utilizing Lean principles, we optimized the development process in order to address initial user issues that were barring the team from product advancement and delivery.
We introduced code review, integrated automatized tests, and eliminated inefficiencies, all of which significantly reduced the cost of onboarding new developers with future company growth in mind.
We worked with Agent Inbox to migrate data from Spark (a data processing engine) to a custom, in-house RETS (real estate transaction standard) aggregator, which helped dramatically grow the customer base.
From experience, we know that small teams working on various platforms simultaneously often end up inadvertently wasting time and money. We worked with Agent Inbox to move to a hybrid solution using React and Ruby on Rails, replacing their single-page-application solution with server-side rendering to improve project stability and speed.
